The cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-user as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical compute engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices.
With multiple clouds operating in different geographical regions, the ability to move workloads running inside of virtual machines from one location to another is a growing desire. Among other things, previous solutions do not address the following: (1) the cost of accessing storage over a WAN once the virtual machine has moved; and (2) the cost of moving large amounts of virtual machine state information over the WAN.